Ellis Marsalis, Jr. died of complications from COVID-19 one year ago this week (April 1, 2020). To mark this anniversary, WWNO veteran and jazz historian Fred Kasten has devoted his weekly program, Jazz New Orleans, to a special Ellis Marsalis tribute.
Ellis Marsalis’ career spanned over 55 years, and Fred Kasten knew Ellis for, well, many of those years, and regularly introduced Ellis and his band at their standing Friday-night shows at Snug Harbor. The tribute program features Ellis solo and in various combinations with other musicians performing a mix of Ellis’ own compositions and his interpretations of music by such all-time greats as Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk.
Interspersed with the 100 minutes of music are talk segments featuring conversation with Ellis, his son Delfeayo, and longtime friends and colleagues Roger Dickerson (composer, educator, pianist), Steve Masakowski (guitarist, educator) and Derek Douget (saxophonist and educator) dealing with these general categories. Roger’s stories of getting started exploring music with Ellis are especially revealing.
The recorded conversations also cover how Ellis came to concentrate on piano, learned to play jazz, developed an impressive reputation among jazz greats outside New Orleans, and became a nationally known music educator.
Listeners will find out what happened when, to quote Ellis, “…my dad and I dragged my mom kicking and screaming from her house and turned it into a jazz club…” known as The Music Haven where all-time jazz greats like John Coltrane and McCoy Tyner performed.
The program will stream Friday, April 2, 8-10 p.m. WWNO 89.9 FM and KTLN 90.5 FM; will be repeated Sunday April 4, 1:00 a.m., and will stream live on wwno.org.
Last September, OffBeat talked to filmmaker Sascha Just, a New York and Berlin-based filmmaker who was documenting the life of Ellis Marsalis until his passing last April. (She visited New Orleans many times and became a close friend of the musician.)
According to the filmmaker, her documentary titled Ellis paints a portrait of a master musician and mentor-to-many who influenced the direction of jazz through his own music and his unique teaching methods. Told by Ellis in his own words and by his colleagues, family members, and disciples the film chronicles the major stations of Ellis’ life—growing up in a segregated society, pursuing his love for bebop in a city devoted to tradjazz, raising a family, building university jazz programs, and eventually retiring.
“With one sentence he could say something really wonderful and be so insightful and funny. That was it — just one sentence. I loved how involved he got when he speaks of things he is interested in and how in depth he could go into about these things. Even though I am not a musician he became a role model on how to pursue something…to stick with it and go with what you love,” Just told OffBeat.
“I appreciated the way he looked at the world . We had a lot of conversations about how to make sense of the world and make sense of the time we are living in – it especially helps me because right now we are living in a very tense time.,” she adds.
